How Vortices Work.

international | sci-tech | other press Monday January 03, 2005 14:28 by being on the yellow brick road to mount doom kansas

a guide for your increased knowledge and preparation.

With Ireland's first tornado reported in the Irish Independent a short guide on how such natural disasters work.

Albert knew something you didn't.

Tornadoes are one of those amazing, awesome acts of nature that simply leaves you dumbfounded -- a huge, swirling, 200-mph beast of a storm that appears to have a mind of its own. You have to actually see one with your own eyes to believe it. In certain places, tornadoes appear with amazing regularity. That's why we see them in the news all the time.

you have ever seen a whirlpool form in your bathtub, sink or toilet when the water is draining, you have seen the fundamentals of a tornado at work. A drain's whirlpool, also known as a vortex, forms because of the downdraft that the drain creates in the body of water. The downward flow of the water into the drain begins to rotate, and as the rotation speeds up the vortex forms.

Why should the water start rotating? There are lots of explanations, but here is one way to think about it (and this way happens to apply to black holes as well as it does to drains). Imagine you are a particle in the water, and you are being pulled toward the suction that the drain creates. You are accelerating toward the point of suction. However, because of your previous momentum, the number of other particles getting sucked toward the point and other factors, chances are that you are going to be off to one side of the point of suction when you arrive. That deflection sets you up on a spiraling path into the point of suction, like a moth spiraling in toward a light. Once the spiral has started in one direction, it tends to influence all of the other particles as they arrive. A very strong spiraling tendency is created. Eventually, there is enough spiraling energy to create a vortex.

Given that you see vortexes all the time in tubs and sinks, it is obviously a fairly common phenomenon. In a tornado, the same sort of thing happens, except with air instead of water.

ornadoes are rated on what is called the Fujita Scale, named for the inventor T. Theodore Fujita. There are six levels in this scale:

Level
Wind Speed

Possible Damage
F0 40 - 72 mph Light damage: Tears branches from trees; rips shallow-rooted trees from the ground; can damage sign-posts, traffic signals and chimneys
F1 73 - 112 mph Moderate damage: Roofing materials and vinyl siding can be displaced; mobile homes are highly vulnerable and can easily be knocked from the foundation or toppled; motorists can be sent careening off road and possibly flipped over
F2 113 - 157 mph Considerable damage: Well established trees are easily uprooted; mobile homes are dessimated; entire roofs can be ripped off houses; train cars and trucking hauls are knocked over; small objects become dangerous missiles
F3 158 - 206 mph Severe damage: Forests are destroyed as a majority of trees are ripped from the ground; entire trains are derailed and knocked over; walls and roofs are torn from houses
F4 207 - 260 mph Devastating damage: Houses and other small structures can be razed entirely; automobiles are propelled through the air.
F5 261 - 318 mph Incredible damage: Cars become projectiles as they are hurled through the air; entire houses are completely destroyed after being ripped from the foundation and sent tumbling into the distance; steel-reinforced concrete structures can be seriously damaged.
Source: NOAA

Often referred to as the "Great Cyclone of St. Louis," a terrifying tornado struck St. Louis, Missouri on May 27, 1896. It's believed that at least 300 (but possibly over 400) people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. Huge chunks of the city were entirely razed and scores of homes were completely demolished. Lacking observation and warning networks such as the national weather service, the residents and business people in the area had no forwarning.

Carts were overturned, property was damaged and if people had had TV then their reception would have been affected.

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Now we presume you read how tectonic plates work when we left the link about the work by the Wimble family to stop them moving some time in the last century, (you remember we found them by mis-spelling womble)-
http://wimble.org/SoPrePlaTec/preventionhome.html
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So progressing nicely to appreciate just like a Nobel Prize winner that the Divine is the ultimate source of all things great good small and bad you are ready to learn how black holes work.

You may have heard someone say, "My desk has become a black hole!" You may have seen an astronomy program on television or read a magazine article on black holes. These exotic objects have captured our imagination ever since they were predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity in 1915.

Mr Einstein was very clever, and stuck his tongue at the people he didn't trust, who he felt would pervert his discoveries for material gain.

A black hole is what remains when a massive star dies.

The concept of an object from which light could not escape (e.g., black hole) was originally proposed by Pierre Simon Laplace in 1795. Using Newton's Theory of Gravity, Laplace calculated that if an object were compressed into a small enough radius, then the escape velocity of that object would be faster than the speed of light.
If you have read How Stars Work, then you know that a star is a huge, amazing fusion reactor. Because stars are so massive and made out of gas, there is an intense gravitational field that is always trying to collapse the star. The fusion reactions happening in the core are like a giant fusion bomb that is trying to explode the star. The balance between the gravitational forces and the explosive forces is what defines the size of the star.

As the star dies, the nuclear fusion reactions stop because the fuel for these reactions gets burned up. At the same time, the star's gravity pulls material inward and compresses the core. As the core compresses, it heats up and eventually creates a supernova explosion in which the material and radiation blasts out into space. What remains is the highly compressed, and extremely massive,
core. The core's gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape.

This object is now a black hole and literally disappears from view. Because the core's gravity is so strong, the core sinks through the fabric of space-time, creating a hole in space-time -- this is why the object is called a black hole.

he core becomes the central part of the black hole called the singularity. The opening of the hole is called the event horizon.

You can think of the event horizon as the mouth of the black hole. Once something passes the event horizon, it is gone for good. Once inside the event horizon, all "events" (points in space-time) stop, and nothing (even light) can escape. The radius of the event horizon is called the Schwarzschild radius, named after astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, whose work led to the theory of black holes.

There are two types of black holes:

* Schwarzschild - Non-rotating black hole
* Kerr - Rotating black hole

The Schwarzschild black hole is the simplest black hole, in which the core does not rotate. This type of black hole only has a singularity and an event horizon.

The Kerr black hole, which is probably the most common form in nature, rotates because the star from which it was formed was rotating. When the rotating star collapses, the core continues to rotate, and this carried over to the black hole (conservation of angular momentum). The Kerr black hole has the following parts:

* Singularity - The collapsed core
* Event horizon - The opening of the hole
* Ergosphere - An egg-shaped region of distorted space around the event horizon (The distortion is caused by the spinning of the black hole, which "drags" the space around it.)
* Static limit - The boundary between the ergosphere and normal space


Photo courtesy NASA
Artist concept of a black hole and its surroundings: The blackened circle is the event horizon and the egg-shaped region is the ergosphere.
If an object passes into the ergosphere it can still be ejected from the black hole by gaining energy from the hole's rotation.

However, if an object crosses the event horizon, it will be sucked into the black hole and never escape. What happens inside the black hole is unknown; even our current theories of physics do not apply in the vicinity of a singularity.

Even though we cannot see a black hole, it does have three properties that can or could be measured:

* Mass
* Electric charge
* Rate of rotation (angular momentum)

As of now, we can only measure the mass of the black hole reliably by the movement of other objects around it. If a black hole has a companion (another star or disk of material), it is possible to measure the radius of rotation or speed of orbit of the material around the unseen black hole. The mass of the black hole can be calculated using Kepler's Modified Third Law of Planetary Motion or rotational motion.

You'll remember Kepler from the sound of a motorbike or stealth aircraft going by and sounding different for some reason.

How We Detect Black Holes:-

Although we cannot see black holes, we can detect or guess the presence of one by measuring its effects on objects around it. The following effects may be used:

* Mass estimates from objects orbiting a black hole or spiraling into the core
* Gravitational lens effects
* Emitted radiation

Mass
Many black holes have objects around them, and by looking at the behavior of the objects you can detect the presence of a black hole. You then use measurements of the movement of objects around a suspected black hole to calculate the black hole's mass.

What you look for is a star or a disk of gas that is behaving as though there were a large mass nearby. For example, if a visible star or disk of gas has a "wobbling" motion or spinning AND there is not a visible reason for this motion AND the invisible reason has an effect that appears to be caused by an object with a mass greater than three solar masses (too big to be a neutron star), then it is possible that a black hole is causing the motion. You then estimate the mass of the black hole by looking at the effect it has on the visible object.

For example, in the core of galaxy NGC 4261, there is a brown, spiral-shaped disk that is rotating. The disk is about the size of our solar system, but weighs 1.2 billion times as much as the sun. Such a huge mass for a disk might indicate that a black hole is present within the disk.

Gravity Lens

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted that gravity could bend space. This was later confirmed during a solar eclipse when a star's position was measured before, during and after the eclipse. The star's position shifted because the light from the star was bent by the sun's gravity. Therefore, an object with immense gravity (like a galaxy or black hole) between the Earth and a distant object could bend the light from the distant object into a focus, much like a lens can.

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Optics like Aucustics is one of the oldest and most guarded of the Elvish arts.
Hobbitsiiis don't get to play with them.

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Q&A.

Q. should I lobby my political representatives to include Tornadoes in the PD manifesto for insurance reform in 2005?
A. no.
Q. should I send copies of the video "the day after tomorrow" to the American Embassy?
A. perhaps.
Q. should I be less gullible about expensive low tech science?
A. quite probably yes.
Q. Should I join the Wimble / Womble family in trying to stop tectonic plate movement?
A. there's no room left. If you're not a member yet, it's too late now.
Q. Should I think about ending World exploitation?
A. very definitely yes.
Q. Can I make my own black hole at home?
A. well you really shouldn't try, you know you really should't try. just like you shouldn't try and clone animals and plants.
Q. why not?
A. because you're not Einstein. You're just a monkey. A Tiresome monkey at that.
Q what can I do to help?
A. send love and peace to all the other creatures of the garden.